The way we go about measuring safety doesn't simply tell us how effective our program is. It has a direct impact on actual performance. This week, I would like to focus on the impact of measurement systems on safety performance.

How Trailing Indicators Hurt the Safety Culture

Measurement of performance can have one of two effects on human behavior. It can motivate us to take positive action; or, just as easily, it can de-motivate us and cause us to withdraw or take negative action.

As we noted last week, the injury data that safety professionals have traditionally used to measure performance are trailing indicators. They identify problems and solutions only after incidents have occurred. The use of trailing indicators to measure safety generally produces a de-motivating effect. It leads to corrective actions that can be perceived by employees to be reactive. "The only time anything gets done around here is after someone gets hurt," employees think. This causes employees to develop a negative view of safety and fosters doubt about the sincerity and level of management's commitment to protecting them.

Once this approach to managing safety occurs a few times, it becomes the norm in the eyes of employees. This undermines the credibility of the safety program. Because employees feel that their safety interests are not in line with management's, when an incident occurs employees tend to take a defensive attitude stating "it wasn't my fault." Couple this with another common negative perception held by employees that investigations are exercises in blame and fault-finding. These negative perceptions encourage employees to dismiss the pursuit of new safety programs and label them as a "flavor of the month." Instead of motivating, our good intentions regarding safety become de-motivating.

Unfortunately, once they develop, these attitudes tend to become embedded in the culture of the organization. That makes them difficult to change.

Towards a Solution: Measuring "Safety" Not Injury

How do you solve this problem? The starting point is to consider our very definition of safety. Traditionally, safety has been thought of as the avoidance of incidents, accidents and injuries. But I submit that safety is actually the flip side of these things - it's the state of being safe. It's more of a behavior than an outcome.

Here's an example. When we talk about a safe driver, we generally mean somebody who has not been in an accident, has not received a speeding ticket and has low insurance rates. Although these are good outcomes, they do not necessarily define the person as a "safe" driver. These outcomes could just as easily have been accomplished as a result of luck. Conversely, otherwise "good" drivers don't necessarily become bad ones merely because they have the misfortune of getting into an accident that wasn't their fault.

The truly "safe" driver is a person who engages in safe driving behavior - who uses turn signals, checks the blind spots when changing lanes, maintains the recommended distance behind the car in front, etc.

Another example: When we measure the performance of athletes, we look at the positive rather than the negative things they accomplish. A bowler is defined not by the number of gutter balls he throws but by how many pins he knocks down. A batter in baseball is evaluated not according to how often he strikes outs but by the number of times he reaches base.

Few safety professionals would argue with the logic of this. So why, then, is safety different? Why do so many of us use (or permit our management to use) a system of measuring safety that's based on injury performance? As safety professionals, we must measure the right thing and use the right metrics. After all, if our decisions are based on faulty data, they'll lead to faulty actions.

Conclusion

The Bottom Line: If we are interested in measuring various aspects of "safety," we must begin to focus on safety performance rather than on injury performance. Next week, in Part 3 of this series, I will examine the role of feedback in safety performance and culture.

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